It is with great pleasure that I request submissions for MANAO — an Open Access repository for anthropology sponsored by the Department of Anthropology at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa. In Hawai’ian “mana’o” means thoughts, ideas, knowledge, or opinions — when making decisions together people in Hawai’i often ask for each other’s mana’o. The Mana’o project combines anthropology’s commitment with the ideal of ‘open access’ with open source software’s focus on free technology. The goal is to provide tools that allow scholars to better communicate with each other and with the world.
Mana’o will ‘soft-launch’ in late-November 2007 during the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Washington D.C. We are currently inviting early adopters to submit work that will be featured in this launch. At the moment we are specifically interested in:
BA Theses
MA Theses
Ph.D. Theses
Articles in peer-reviewed journals
Papers given at academic conferences
Digitized books
If you would like to deposit your work with us, simply email it to submissions@manaoproject.org and our staff will process it and deposit it in Mana’o. If you already have your publications online, simply send us the URL and we will process the material ourselves.
Please note that we can only deposit documents that are in the public domain, documents for which you clearly hold the copyright, or documents for which the copyright owner (typically, the publisher) permits authors to deposit their work in a repository such as this. Unfortunately, this does not include PDFs of your dissertation created by UMI (unless you have used the UMI Open Access publishing option). We can, however, accept the electronic documents that you submitted to UMI when you deposited your dissertation with your university library. If you are unsure who owns the copyright to the work you wish to submit, we can work with you to determine your rights.
Anthropologists have long been concerned with making their world available to the public, including the communities with whom they have lived and conducted fieldwork. Mana’o represents an important step forward in creating concrete open access solutions for anthropology. I hope that you will be part of our initial program, and I look forward
to receiving your submission!
Please circulate this call for submissions as widely as possible. If you are interested in volunteering for the project, please do not hesitate to contact me at golub@hawaii.edu.
Thank you,
Alex Golub, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Anthropology
University of Hawai’i at Manoa
Rex, what a fantastic idea. I’ll hunt down the version of my diss. that I submitted and send it along with a couple of things that are in the public domain. But here’s another idea: many journals allow authors to publish on their own websites the things they have written in the version that they submitted to the publisher, a year or two or three after it’s published. So for example say I had an article “Z” published in X Journal a couple of years ago. I can’t post the PDF of “Z” on my website, but I can post the Word document of the final version of “Z” on my website, along with a link to the published article on the X Journal website (which people may or may not have access to depending on whether their library has subscribed to X Journal). Correct me if I’m wrong on any of this (and I know the rules differ by journal). I do this for my own articles and link to them from my online CV. But I’ve found that it’s really hard to find those articles doing a Google search, so probably nobody finds them anyway. So what would be ideal would be to have an index somewhere of the articles that people put on their own websites. Now, I can’t post “Z” on another website that’s not my own personal website. But I expect I could post the abstract and link to my website on another website. Would Mana’o consider doing something like that as part of their open access repository? I know it would be a challenge to keep track of all the links; websites and web addresses are never all that stable, so it might not be something that you have the capability or interest in trying. But it would be a way that people who are really interested in the idea of open access could radically expand access to their work without violating copyright law. (Maybe something like this already exists and I don’t know about it?)
Thanks L.L. —
If you want to help please post this call for submissions to Culture Matters! 🙂
Your first question: I’m familiar with the wide variety of licenses that publishers use, and the short answer is that you should contact support@manaoproject.org and we can advise you on how the self-archiving clauses in your agreement relate to a repository. Please don’t assume you can’t share! Often self-archiving clauses and non-profit repositories are more sympatico then you’d think.
The second question you ask has to do with creating and sharing metadata. Uh… its difficult to get into details here unless you are a librarian or technologist who REALLY cares about this stuff. The short answer is: things in our repository will be available for ‘harvesting’ so they will be easier to find, but at this pre-release stage we are building a ‘collection of content’, not a ‘catalog’ — if that makes sense.
Alex, Congratulations on this important development. The new repository will be especially valuable to those who want to start depositing their work but whose home institutions are not ready to build and maintain such systems. Thanks for the hard work that you and colleagues have invested in it, and to the University of Hawai’i for hosting it.
Done, Rex: http://culturematters.wordpress.com/2007/10/09/manao-new-open-access-repository-for-anthropology/
cheers
Lisa
What is the current status of the Mana’o Open Access Project? It’s not unusual for me to try to visit the site, or send someone there, only to find that the site isn’t working. Has it been too successful? can it not handle the 100s or even 1000s of people who want access to our dissertations, theses, drafts, articles, chapters, etc.? I hope it’s not legal problems from nasty publishers.
Seriously, what’s the state of play on our very own Open Access, Rex?